The mattress afternoon: the squeaking bed, the collapse — his son's one memory of him in the son's own voice

pivotal · Winter B.S. 1963, Sepulveda CA

• When: "WINTER, B.S. 1963, SEPULVEDA CA"; a single bright afternoon, the father home from the commercial studio still in full Man-from-Glad costume
• What: His other extended appearance, at one remove: the adult J.O.I.'s first-person reminiscence (per n.208, a chapter — "The Awakening of My Interest in Annular Systems" — from a published collection of fusion pioneers' memoirs; see Dating notes). Obsessed with a squeak in the master bed ("Boiling hordes of gibbering squeaking ravenous rapacious rats," he says, "almost trembling with irritation"), the father — tomato-juice drink in hand, sweating makeup in orange lines from under the rigid white wig — conscripts his son (ten in the Winter-1960 scene, so ~thirteen here — derived, not stated in-scene) to haul mattress and box spring into the hall and expose the frame. The afternoon is a portrait in miniature: the mood that "surrounded him like a field"; the digs at the silent, chain-smoking mother ("Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned, I’m standing here prompted to fucking muse out loud"); the clap on the back with the monologue's own verbatim tic — "That’s the way she wants doing, Jim" (see Dating notes); the "old competitive-tennis injury" hobbling his half of the lifting; and the end: squatting over the dust, he vomits ("It was not too uncommon for my father to be taken ill shortly after coming home from work to relax, but now he seemed to have been taken really ill."), faints, and pitches face-down into the dust and stomach material, the wig detached and lying "scalp-up," the frame broken in half under his weight. The boy steps over his legs — "Excuse me," I said. — helps his mother with the vacuum, and goes upstairs, where a sheared doorknob's rolling sets off his life's interest in annulation. The father is left lying there; the scene never picks him back up. [Attribution note: entirely the son's telling, decades on, in a formal published-reminiscence register; as printed.]